Falun Gong

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a new religious movement that draws on Chinese Buddhist, Daoist, and qigong traditions to promote a system of daily practice that aims at the transformation of one's “human flesh-body” into an immortal Buddha body. The movement's founder, Li Hongzhi, rapidly rose to fame amid the widespread popularity of qigong practices in Chinese society in the 1980s and 1990s, claiming that Falun Gong was distinct from and superior to any other practice or path. Having emerged in northeastern China in 1992, the group claimed as many as 70 million practitioners in China by the time the movement was outlawed by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999, when it was officially denounced as an evil cult. After years of ...